A consequence of firm theory is that more standardized arrangements lead to less friction in negotiations, and smaller companies. Conversely the more that arrangements are in flux, the more that you need an integrated company to enable the refactoring of roles.
> Firm theory says that all companies exist to reduce the friction of negotiating all these things over and over again.
But the negotiation costs are coming down. There's now a number of somewhat standardised roles in your typical web startup (design, dev, PM, etc) and there's enough common language that expectations are close enough to being met.
There's also virtually no running costs at the MVP stage. You can rent servers, and you can avoid renting an office. So you don't have the negotiating problem of who swallows the losses, because the losses are just your individual opportunity costs.
This is of course for your typical unspecific "let's make an app" idea. If you need real capital, the firm is still a good place to start.
This is assuming that roles are static and unchanging and technologies don't morph. Which they do. The idea that negotiation costs are coming down constantly is fallacious and unrelated to a reality where tech keeps changing.
What do you think a market is, if not negotiations about prices?
The simplest markets are commodity markets: there are a large number of sellers, a large number of buyers, a large quantity of goods which are all substitutable for each other -- who cares whether you buy this bushel of winter wheat vs that other one? -- and everyone has perfect communication with each other.
Like perfectly spherical cows, this doesn't happen exactly in the real world, but is close enough to some scenarios to be useful.
Here are factors which affect the price in the market and therefore require negotiation:
(I left out governments, taxes, and all sorts of illegal things that won't count as "transparent", but exist anyway.)
And that's just to buy grain, a commodity so basic that the Babylonians invented accounting and writing to deal with it.
Yes, you need to negotiate. Sometimes you can just say: "the price you quoted is sufficiently low that I can accept it immediately", but that's merely the fastest negotiation.
Not necessarily. You just need a trustworthy reputation system to go with everything else. Some things will cost more, some less, more reputation costs more, too. Relevant, in demand experience costs more.